Ecopoetics Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
"When Ezra Pound quipped in a letter to R.P. Blackmur in 1924 that ‘one can no longer put Mt Purgatory forty miles high in the midst of Australian sheep land’, he was of course mocking the medieval cosmography of Dante’s La Divina... more
"When Ezra Pound quipped in a letter to R.P. Blackmur in 1924 that ‘one can no longer put Mt Purgatory forty miles high in the midst of Australian sheep land’, he was of course mocking the medieval cosmography of Dante’s La Divina Commedia, which locates Mount Purgatory in the Antipodes..."
Anima de Wajdi Mouawad nous offre l'occasion d'explorer la question de savoir ce qui se produit lorsque l'écopoétique s'intéresse à un texte qui n'est pas ostentatoirement environnementaliste. En effet, hormis ses animaux narrateurs,... more
Anima de Wajdi Mouawad nous offre l'occasion d'explorer la question de savoir ce qui se produit lorsque l'écopoétique s'intéresse à un texte qui n'est pas ostentatoirement environnementaliste. En effet, hormis ses animaux narrateurs, Anima semble être un texte à priori dépourvu de richesse écopoétique évidente. Pourtant, l'étude proposée va permettre de montrer, d'une part, que la sensibilité écopoétique ne se consacre pas uniquement à l'environnement, mais également à la notion plus vaste d'oikos ; d'autre part, que les techniques narratives du roman mettent en place une déconstruction du propre de l'homme.
Brenda Hillman’s 2018 collection, Extra Hidden Life Among the Days, is rich with many lives—bacterial, human, arboreal, fungal. A multi-media, mycelial entanglement of elegies, personal photographs, and journal meditations, Hillman’s... more
Brenda Hillman’s 2018 collection, Extra Hidden Life Among the Days, is rich with many
lives—bacterial, human, arboreal, fungal. A multi-media, mycelial entanglement of elegies, personal photographs, and journal meditations, Hillman’s linguistic materials take the viewer from her family’s home in Tucson to the White House Lawn, weaving contemporary political struggles into her own observations of human-nature relationships, as well as the agency of forests and lichen. How might one describe Hillman’s work? To simply call it ‘ecopoetics’ does not do her experimental storytelling justice. Rather, we might better understand Hillman’s reconfiguration of Romantic, timeless environmental writing into a timely, expansive bio-cultural ecology as ‘political-pastoral,’ a type of poetic writing that embraces humanity’s impact on landscapes, that imbues the natural world with political symbolism.
Cahiers de littérature orale est mis à disposition selon les termes de la Licence Creative Commons Attribution-Pas d'Utilisation Commerciale 4.0 International. Interview: Katell Morand "The juxtaposition of contrasting grammatical... more
Cahiers de littérature orale est mis à disposition selon les termes de la Licence Creative Commons Attribution-Pas d'Utilisation Commerciale 4.0 International. Interview: Katell Morand "The juxtaposition of contrasting grammatical concepts may be compared with the so-called 'dynamic cutting' in film montage, a type of cutting, which, e.g, in Spottiswoode's definition, uses the juxtaposition of contrasting shots or sequences to generate in the mind of the spectator ideas that these shots or sequences by themselves do not carry." Roman Jakobson 1 K.M: 2 The poetics of place has been a central theme in your work since the 1970s. After years of doing fieldwork in Bosavi, Papua New Guinea, you introduced in 1993 in your influential essay "Waterfalls of song" the concept of "acoustemology, " or sound as a way of knowing, 3 and you analyzed in fine detail the linguistic and poetic features of the Bosavi acoustemology. As a way of introducing the French translation of this essay, I would like to focus on the poetic performances of the Bosavi people: what they tell of a way of being in the world, and how you have chosen to translate and represent them through texts,
Op het eerste gezicht is de bijdrage van Xavier Roelens (Menen, 1976; ook wel X Roelens) aan de 21•-eeuwse Nederland talige poëzie bescheiden. Na zijn debuut er is een spookrijder gesignaleerd (2007, hierna G) publiceerde hij tot dusver... more
Op het eerste gezicht is de bijdrage van Xavier Roelens (Menen, 1976; ook wel X Roelens) aan de 21•-eeuwse Nederland talige poëzie bescheiden. Na zijn debuut er is een spookrijder gesignaleerd (2007, hierna G) publiceerde hij tot dusver één andere bundel: stormen, olielekken, motetten. over de twee hoofdbestanddelen van de mens: water & relaties (2012, OM). Het manu cript van die laat te bundel won een premie tijden het Kun tenfe tival Watou 2011 (de Prij voor Letterkunde -Poëzi van de provincie We ·t-Vlaanderen) en werd een jaar later enomin erd voor de Herman d oninckprij .
The paper deals with the topic of ecologically oriented poetry of Krystyna Miłobędzka as a vital tradition for 21st-century Polish ecopoets. The author tries to trace the changes in the poetic canon after 1990 and shows the increasing... more
The paper deals with the topic of ecologically oriented poetry of Krystyna Miłobędzka as a vital tradition for 21st-century Polish ecopoets. The author tries to trace the changes in the poetic canon after 1990 and shows the increasing interest in Miłobędzka’s poetry among modern poets. By analyzing mainly meta-poetic texts, the paper contrasts Miłobędzka’s posthumanistic, “event-driven” way of writing with the humanistic lyrical subject of Wisława Szymborska’s poetry. The author presents the former as more influential and more productive for modern, ecopoetic styles, including elements such as: waking the awareness, organic perspective of language, an egalitarian way of life and thinking about relations in categories of space and adhesion rather than domination.
Comparative analyses of poetry by German Sarah Kirsch, Emirati Ahmed Rashid Thani, and St Lucian Derek Walcott identify three distinct ecopoetic elements their work has in common. The three poets, born before the origin of ecocriticism,... more
Comparative analyses of poetry by German Sarah Kirsch, Emirati Ahmed Rashid Thani, and St Lucian Derek Walcott identify three distinct ecopoetic elements their work has in common. The three poets, born before the origin of ecocriticism, favour metaphors that represent natural landscapes. These metaphors express a certain "nature-centrism," and explicit references to environmental threats provoke approaches informed by ecocriticism to the oeuvres of all three poets alike. While the analyses highlight stylistic and culture-related differences, they manifest the urgency of an awareness for the global in the context of sustainability.
This book asks what it means to write poetry in and about the Anthropocene, the name given to a geological epoch where humans have a global ecological impact. Combining critical approaches such as ecocriticism and posthumanism with close... more
This thesis will explore the work of performance poet, Kate Tempest, and the status of her poetry as an empowering mode of Foucauldian counter-conduct. It will outline the urban, impoverished demographic Tempest speaks for and its... more
This thesis will explore the work of performance poet, Kate Tempest, and the status of her poetry as an empowering mode of Foucauldian counter-conduct. It will outline the urban, impoverished demographic Tempest speaks for and its implications for the motifs of alienation, apathy and frustration in her work, and how certain traits of her poetry attempt to offset these negative phenomena of modern consciousness. Firstly, Tempest’s particular brand of hip hop will be considered in relation to Jonathan Bate’s theory of ecopoetics, the poetic creation of a dwelling place. This consideration will be assessed alongside her other form of poiesis, the creation of myth, and the way these two modes work in conjunction to create an empowering discursive space for her audience to authenticate and ground themselves. Finally, this thesis will discuss the ways in which Tempest’s oral context fundamentally enriches the democratic, communalising and dissident elements discussed above.
John Burnside won the prestigious T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry in 2012. His work is renowned for its interest in ecology and yet it is not distracted from a post-industrial landscape that informs a philosophical lyrical mode. Such lyricism... more
John Burnside won the prestigious T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry in 2012. His work is renowned for its interest in ecology and yet it is not distracted from a post-industrial landscape that informs a philosophical lyrical mode. Such lyricism is the bedrock for an inquiry into the question of history alongside both the spiritually inflected depiction of nature, and an interest in relationships on various scales between various agents over time. Humans, flora and fauna are consolidated into ideas of change and the making of home (or temporary residency on a changing earth), which draw from may sources, particularly British mythology, American modernism and European culture and philosophy with peculiar ecological resonance.
This article begins with a climate poem and ends with a climate poem. In between, I explore what it means to do climate geopoetics. The first section addresses recent literary work that engages with climate change and the Anthropocene and... more
This article begins with a climate poem and ends with a climate poem. In between, I explore what it means to do climate geopoetics. The first section addresses recent literary work that engages with climate change and the Anthropocene and outlines the geopoetic field as it is currently emerging as a subfield of the geohumanities. Next, I turn to examining climate narratives and frames; following the lead of many human geographers and environmental humanities scholars, I approach climate change as a social and cultural issue. I then discuss the methodology of this particular climate geopoetics project, commenting on and contextualizing some of my writing and thinking process for the climate poems that are woven throughout the article. By centering this article around three poems, I explore what it means to do climate geopoetics, the curious nature of the Anthropocene/Anthroposcene as a concept that both centers and de-centers the human, and the tensions on textual form that geopoetic practices create. It is my hope that this project may offer a fresh and unconventional approach to examining the multiple ways that climate change is framed, engaged, and contested.
"The tradition of Transatlantic Romantic poetry claims nature as a key figure. In Ralph Waldo Emerson’s early work, Nature, published in 1836, he writes that “Nature, in the common sense, refers to essences unchanged by man; space, the... more
"The tradition of Transatlantic Romantic poetry claims nature as a key figure. In Ralph Waldo Emerson’s early work, Nature, published in 1836, he writes that “Nature, in the common sense, refers to essences unchanged by man; space, the air, the river, the leaf,” and “[t]he world thus exists to the soul to satisfy the desire of beauty” (NCE 28, 34). He even feels the idealistic erasure of his subject position in Nature when he famously writes,” I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all” (29). However, according to Mary Chapman, “Emerson experience[s] a melancholic impasse after Waldo’s death,...[and in attempt] to reconcile...the calamity” (76), he philosophically wavers. I posit that his philosophy of idealism with regard to the natural world begins to vacillate, rather than stagnate, after Waldo’s death. Some theorists, such as Gyula Somogyi, argue that Emerson’s “Threnody,” “offer[s] only a hollow repetition of poetic conventions delivering no real consolation for the trauma” (317), and I agree that Emerson never completely achieves consolation, but his poetic conventions are substantive and the genre of poetry allows him to explore options of relief that weren’t fully available in his journals or letters. In a journal entry from 1857, Emerson claims, “My philosophy holds to a few laws, [one of which is]…Flowing” (JMN 14:191), so I analyze “Threnody” as it exists in contradistinction with Nature and some of Emerson’s journals from around the time of his son’s death to show how they begin to depict nature as frequently divided and indifferent while always ideologically fluctuating. I propose that Waldo’s death, as elegized in “Threnody,” actually inspired Emerson toward a more postmodern understanding of reality and the environment through a queer ecopoetics of destabilization."
Several related questions concern me as a poet in the 21 st century: Does poetry have any function in the current political-environmental debate? Can the poet's role as interpreter, witness and communicator help to bridge the chasms... more
Several related questions concern me as a poet in the 21 st century: Does poetry have any function in the current political-environmental debate? Can the poet's role as interpreter, witness and communicator help to bridge the chasms between art, science, philosophy, and politics in order to catalyze the change in mindset necessary to save this planet? As text-based, language-based artists, how can we begin to heal the rift between science and human experience? Nature as commodity and nature as interconnected ecosystems.
Le roman Les Sept Solitudes de Lorsa Lopez installe son lecteur dans un présent ressenti comme « le temps de la fin2 » dont parle Bruno Latour à propos de notre Anthropocène, porteur d’une charge géologique aussi intense qu’irrémédiable... more
Le roman Les Sept Solitudes de Lorsa Lopez installe son lecteur dans un présent ressenti comme « le temps de la fin2 » dont parle Bruno Latour
à propos de notre Anthropocène, porteur d’une charge géologique aussi intense qu’irrémédiable et marqué
par la présence de « Gaïa3 ». Il s’agit de comprendre quels liens le présent de la fiction de Sony Labou Tansi entretient avec un avenir qui n’est
plus à venir. Aussi l’écrivain congolais élabore-t-il une poétique de la finitude du présent, loin de toute tentative de maîtrise du temps. Cette fragilité est prise en charge par le style d’écriture sonyen qui prend le temps de nommer la contradiction d’un présent humain à la fois limité et ouvert sur l’infini géologique. Mon hypothèse est que le présent dans lequel Sony Labou Tansi installe sa fiction coïncide de façon troublante avec l’Anthropocène, vécu comme l’âge de l’intrusion de la Terre dans l’histoire humaine.
Accretion, articulation, exploration, transformation, naming, sentiment, private and public property these are just a few of Juliana Spahr's interests. In this, her third collection of poetry, we find her performing her characteristic... more
During the last decades, ecology has become a global socio-political stake, but also a recurrent literary theme. The recent research field of ecocriticism is rooted in the US, but is rapidly spreading across the scientific and cultural... more
During the last decades, ecology has become a global socio-political stake, but also a recurrent literary theme. The recent research field of ecocriticism is rooted in the US, but is rapidly spreading across the scientific and cultural worlds, diversifying its interests and methods. Scholars all over the world particularly stress the importance of developing a comparative ecocriticism that internationally explores ecological discourses in different languages and cultures. According to the book’s aims, this paper compares three works of literature, which address environmental problems and/or try to develop an ecological sensibility, trespassing not national, but linguistic borders.
The study of children’s literature has not been waiting for ecocritical theory to attest the importance of ecology as a main theme in texts addressing children. In many ways, education and consciousness-raising of the younger generations are supposed to be crucial, because these future adults will be even more concerned with climate change and will have to offer creative solutions to the environmental crisis. Yet, excessive pedagogy, enforcing awareness or even guilt, of both environmental writings and didactical children’s literature, has been a central aesthetical problem. This invites us not to limit our conclusions to an evaluation of the texts’ ecological substance and correctness, but rather to describe the multiple bonds between nature, aesthetics and narratives. We thus choose three works in three different languages which represent three different literary genres, namely crime fiction, fairy tale and poetry, to suggest that this poetical diversity of languages, motives, themes and narratives has to be seen as literature’s stand for nature’s protection in a multicultural landscape.
Les défis écologiques que soulèvent nos rapports aux mondes non-humains et les défis politiques lancés par les désirs et nécessités d'un vivre ensemble qui s'inventerait dans les interstices du capitalisme écocidaire traversent autant... more
Les défis écologiques que soulèvent nos rapports aux mondes non-humains et les défis politiques lancés par les désirs et nécessités d'un vivre ensemble qui s'inventerait dans les interstices du capitalisme écocidaire traversent autant l'actualité sociale que celle des pratiques somatiques. Le champ qui nous réunit autour de cet ouvrage est celui des manières dont nos expériences, nos pratiques et nos pensées s'articulent ensemble. Les pratiques somatiques constituent un champ privilégié pour observer, critiquer, inventer et cultiver ces articulations : c'est à partir de cette première intuition que nous avons engagé le travail de cet ouvrage.
- by Joanne Clavel and +1
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- Politics, Somatics, Ecology, Ecopoetics
This ecocritical book traces the environmental sensibilities of two Anglophone poets; Nobel Prize-winner Seamus Heaney (1939-2013), and British Poet Laureate Ted Hughes (1930-1998). Drawing on recent and multifarious developments in... more
This ecocritical book traces the environmental sensibilities of two Anglophone poets; Nobel Prize-winner Seamus Heaney (1939-2013), and British Poet Laureate Ted Hughes (1930-1998). Drawing on recent and multifarious developments in ecocritical theory, it examines how Hughes's and Heaney's respective poetics interact with late twentieth century developments in environmental thought, focusing in particular on ideas about ecology and environment in relation to religion, time, technology, colonialism, semiotics, and globalisation.
Este ensayo explora la obra poética de Issa Kobayashi, considerado uno de los grandes maestros del haiku en Japón. Se enfoca en los poemas que el haijin oriundo de la provincia montañosa de Shinano escribió contemplando las vidas de los... more
Este ensayo explora la obra poética de Issa Kobayashi, considerado uno de los grandes maestros del haiku en Japón. Se enfoca en los poemas que el haijin oriundo de la provincia montañosa de Shinano escribió contemplando las vidas de los pequeños seres: los insectos y otros animales domésticos como perros y gallinas. Explora una lectura ecopoética de estos haikus de Issa a partir de la lente de una "mística campesina" que puede contribuir a dar forma a una espiritualidad ecológica moderna. Se incluyen haikus selectos sobre estos pequeños seres traducidos por el autor y fotografías del templo Entenji, en la metrópolis de Tokio, que está dedicado al poeta.
Poetry and Essay. Just as Sinclair exposed humanity's lack of humanity in The Jungle over a hundred years ago, Gudding creates, in LITERATURE FOR NONHUMANS, a vivid lyric investigation of our society's current slide from an age of... more
Poetry and Essay. Just as Sinclair exposed humanity's lack of humanity in The Jungle over a hundred years ago, Gudding creates, in LITERATURE FOR NONHUMANS, a vivid lyric investigation of our society's current slide from an age of destruction into a new age of extinctions. In this multidisciplinary & interdisciplinary text, Gudding notches every inch between lament and manifesto and intersects every topic from here (piglets, zombies, Illinois) to heaven where, upon arrival, we find 'Christ as an anal robot-king we've set narratively running at the edge of history to serve as a reparator by vicarious redemption.' Prepare to be horrified, crackled, poem-ed. Prepare to be schooled." - Amy King"
This essay is an extract from my Master's dissertation; a comparative analysis of the poetical works of Ted Hughes and Jibanananda Das, in terms of theme imagery and diction. The representation of animals in the poems of Hughes and Das is... more
This essay is an extract from my Master's dissertation; a comparative analysis of the poetical works of Ted Hughes and Jibanananda Das, in terms of theme imagery and diction. The representation of animals in the poems of Hughes and Das is the chief focus of the essay. The theoretical framework for this analysis is the concept of totemic animals, and their relationship with humans in existing indigenous cultures. The theories on Carl Gustav Jung, Mircea Eliade and Alan Bleakley are taken into account in this context. The essay establishes that the works of both Das and Hughes express anti-anthropocentric sentiments in their poems through the representation of animals. In doing so, they show some striking similarities in terms of imagery and diction. Both their poems display a clear Jungian influence and Shamanistic elements, although Hughes's works show the latter traits more visibly.
Poetry aspires to reveal the world for what it is. Ecopoetics reaffirms the world in its complexity and proposes an engagement with-or attunement to-an original world: one dynamic and rich and devised of a continuum of interrelations, a... more
Poetry aspires to reveal the world for what it is. Ecopoetics reaffirms the world in its complexity and proposes an engagement with-or attunement to-an original world: one dynamic and rich and devised of a continuum of interrelations, a overlooked/missed world that is rarely registered in our everyday, natural attitude. As a discipline, poetry is vigorous, imaginative and alternative; it opens up clearings in our mental conception of the world, providing us with new paths of investigation, and it makes available other possible worlds to those commonly offered to our understanding. Ecopoetics extends this art-form (poetry) with the intention of foregrounding an investigation into ecology: a word derived from the Greek oikos (home) and logos (word, reason, thought). As a discipline, ecopoetics investigates (a) how the human is situated within its habitat; (b) how "home" is defined and built; (c) where (or whether) borders exist between body and world, human and other, space and place; and (d) how sense activities, physical presences, memory, and moments of thinking locate and assist the human desire to navigate the self in the world.
Two years after Hurricane Hugo, which in 1989 devastated the unincorporated US territory St. Croix, and one year prior to her death from cancer, African Caribbean American poet Audre Lorde wrote a poem called "Restoration: A... more
Two years after Hurricane Hugo, which in 1989 devastated the unincorporated US territory St. Croix, and one year prior to her death from cancer, African Caribbean American poet Audre Lorde wrote a poem called "Restoration: A Memorial-9/18/91." The poem grew partly out of a series of journal entries that Lorde made in the wake of Hugo on St. Croix, her home at the time, and bears witness to the storm's catastrophic aftermath, which, in Lorde's view, was "man-made." 1 In her journal Lorde suggests that the Caribbean island had been made sick by the capitalist US government, which exploited it for its resources and then neglected it after the disasterjust as her own body had been made sick by pollution from US industry on the mainland and then sicker by the profitdriven "Cancer Establishment." In this chapter, I will explore Lorde's concept of restoration in both her poem and her journals. The concept empowered her to confront and resist the environmental injustice she saw affecting the environment around her along with her individual body. Throughout her writings, Lorde addresses environmental injustice. She writes about how her childhood home of Harlem, for example, with its sparse city parks and "sooty-pebbled" riverbank, was often dirtied by industry. 2 Lorde also describes how the pollution of her adult home on Staten Islandwater contaminated by refinery runoff and air thick with industrial fumesthreatened people who were already vulnerable: poor women, women of color, and queer women. In what Lorde named a "woman-devaluating culture," 3 where women of color bear the brunt of environmental hazard, the erotic, creative "lifeforce" of women is perpetually under assault. 4 For Lorde, the stark message for her as a Black lesbian with cancer was that she was never meant to survive. 5 When Lorde left the city and went to live on St. Croix, she made connections between her long battle with breast cancer and the disaster that was Hugo, concluding that both were the result of environmental racism. In light of her critique, I hope to show how Lorde's concept of 208 angela hume
The philosophy of biomimicry, I argue, consists of four main areas of inquiry. The first, which has already been explored by Freya Mathews (2011), concerns the “deep” question of what Nature ultimately is. The second, third, and fourth... more
The philosophy of biomimicry, I argue, consists of four main areas of inquiry. The first, which has already been explored by Freya Mathews (2011), concerns the “deep” question of what Nature ultimately is. The second, third, and fourth areas correspond to the three basic principles of biomimicry as laid out by Janine Benyus (1997). “Nature as model” is the poetic principle of biomimicry, for it tells us how it is that things are to be “brought forth” (poiēsis). “Nature as measure” is the ethical principle of biomimicry, for it tells us that Nature places ethical limits or standards on what it is possible for us to accomplish. And “Nature as mentor” is the epistemological principle of biomimicry, for it affirms that Nature is the ultimate source of truth, wisdom, and freedom from error. Within this overall framework, I argue that seeing Nature as physis – understood as “self-production” or “self-placing-into-the-open” – constitutes the requisite ground for the poetic, ethical, and epistemological principles of biomimicry, and that biomimicry thus conceived involves a new philosophical paradigm, which I call “enlightened naturalism”.
Drawing on IA Richards's work on practical criticism and close reading, the article critiques the idea of motivated form in ecopoetics, which suggests that there is a non-trivial relationship between poetic form and some aspect of... more
Drawing on IA Richards's work on practical criticism and close reading, the article critiques the idea of motivated form in ecopoetics, which suggests that there is a non-trivial relationship between poetic form and some aspect of physical ecosystems. Two ecopoems are closely analysed to indicate how questions of form might be used in ecopoetic analysis.
- by Greg Garrard and +1
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- Ecocriticism, Ecopoetics, I.A. Richards
- by Samia Rahimtoola and +1
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- Queer Theory, Ecopoetics, Queer Ecology